Right of Way

Drizzle soothed my warm ham face. I ate a sausage bap and got wet. The bus to Land’s End was open-top, but nobody’d brought their goggles so we all sat on the lower deck peering at the bottom half of some green and grey views for an hour. I wondered about the first-and-last pub at our destination, I vaguely remembered its existence from a school trip or a family holiday or a film or a dream or a newspaper article or an episode of Michael Palin's Affable Wayfaring or a hallucination or absurd wish I had once. The drizzle stopped. The bus stopped. The pub was still standing, but it seemed like some slobbering maniac with a hammer’d boarded up all the windows. I checked round the other side, thinking maybe there was some kind of sunlight tax in operation (if you want natural light you'd better go outside and fucking work for it, explained Mr. Osborne, not just loaf around in booths and nooks, drinking yourself gormless and sucking away the sunlight from hard-working British outdoor family units, before laying down a classic slide show about how the way to solve a problem is to make it worse, to a theatre full of thieves and ghouls, naked except for hoods) and they’d covered up all but one of the windows to keep the overheads down and pass on their savings to you, the valued customer, in the form of competetively-priced while still independently-owned pints. But no. There was a man pulling things out of the front garden and putting them in a bucket. It’s closed, he said.

I turned around and strode and wept manfully towards the westernmost shopping village in England. Tears slid down my neck while I looked at jumpers and sweets and wondered what this tiny mall had to do with the demise of the pub. Probably everything. Maybe I should snap all the sticks of rock in half and start eating the fudge without taking it out of the boxes until someone views my thirst and anguish seriously. French children threw soft toys at German children. I went and stood on the edge of a cliff.

It was a good cliff, surrounded by other good cliffs, and I walked towards Sennen Cove wondering if there are people who grow up without cliffs like there are people who grow up without snow, and thought I might write the word cliffs down as a note to myself, and discovered I’d lost my pen.

I walked up the hill to the Sennen post office bus stop and waited for the bus to Porthcurno. It arrived exactly on time but on the opposite side of the road to the one advertised, and for some reason didn’t take my slightly narrowed eyebrows as an indication it should stop. I waited a bit longer and got the bus to St Ives, thinking how many times can a man accidentally arrive in St Ives in one holiday, but I haven't been to the Tate yet so I guess I'll do that now. 

I got off the bus and bought a chicken pasty to eat on the walk to the gallery, and it tasted good and made me think that I was doing the right thing and that all my hopes and dreams were perfectly valid and in no way unattainable, and on the final stretch, gallery to the left, sea in front, last bite of pasty in my raised right hand and me looking at it thinking we were fucking made for each other, you and I, there was a ripple in the atmosphere and the sudden sense of an uninvited presence and no noise at all and then I was looking at the ascending behind of a seagull with my food in its beak, clearly unwilling to negotiate or apologise, and an American couple in white baseball caps asked me if I was alright, and I said I spose it was my turn. I was still hungry.